Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured those jurisdictions that do lock down would see only a fraction of the death toll.

Then, once vaccines became available, the narrative was modified to “Get shots in arms and then covid will stop spreading. Those countries without vaccines, on the other hand, will continue to face mass casualties.”

Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020
By Thomas Piketty
Yale University Press, 2021
352 pages

Daniel McAdams is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and coproducer/cohost of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to US congressman Ron Paul from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993 to 1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former Communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

For months the battle over the Federal Reserve has been playing out within the financial press. On one side, the Warren wing of the Democrat Party trying to make institutional gains within the central bank. On the other, allies of Janet Yellen have promoted Jerome Powell as a fellow traveler.

Joe Weisenthal is an editor and host at Bloomberg who has recently been using his large Twitter platform to cast stones at the inflation hawks. In one recent thread, Weisenthal mocked the people worried about the falling purchasing power of the US dollar, and claimed in fact that it would be immoral for currency to maintain its value over time.

United States consumer confidence has plummeted to a decade-low in November. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index fell to 66.8 in November, down sharply from the October figure of 71.7 and well below consensus forecasts of 72.4. Inflation is hurting consumers and the impact on daily purchases is more severe than what the Federal Reserve and consensus estimates may want to believe.